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"Hobbs approached the educators at the Holocaust Museum about acquiring the same "Mind Over Media" title and expanding the content. She was successful and has created a new resource where she invites educators, students and others to contribute examples of contemporary propaganda. (Full disclosure, I reviewed the site prior to its unveiling and contributed examples.) In an introductory video posted on the website the narrator says "in a world saturated by media messages, propaganda can be found in information, news, advertising or entertainment." The website uses crowdsourcing to create a gallery of propaganda examples. Users upload content they've located, share their own interpretations, and then evaluate the impact of the images, web pages or videos. "

"Just before the holidays, late-night comedian Conan O'Brien poked a little fun at local TV newscasts. In doing so, he illustrated some serious issues about the compromises journalists make in understaffed newsrooms. O'Brien has aired similar montages in the past, capturing repetition in local stories about such topics as Cyber Monday shopping, restaurants that serve political-themed food, and the news that actor Mike Myers and his wife were expecting a baby. The compilations are popular fodder for Internet discussions, where viewers attributed the homogeneity to "consumerist propaganda," "controlled brainwashing," and "corporations spitting out prefabricated copies of fake news." The truth is less conspiratorial. Each story O'Brien featured was supplied by a syndication service that distributes scripts, video clips, and fully-produced news packages to local stations. The self gifting story came from CNN Newsource, which claims 800 affiliates. (CNN is part of Time Warner, which also owns the TBS cable channel that airs "Conan.") You're almost certainly watching syndicated content when your local newscast shows video of national or international stories. Stations also rely on Newsource for sports highlights, business and consumer reports, entertainment news, and stories CNN categorizes as "Caught on Camera," "Animals," "Kickers," and "Easy to Tease.""

"How much of our local news is propaganda? Stations are slipping sponsored "video news releases" - promotional segments designed to look like objective news reports - into their regular programming. And increasingly they're using these VNRs without identifying them as such. This deception is illegal under federal law and Federal Communications Commission rules. Presenting VNRs as actual news breaches the trust between local stations and their communities. By disguising advertisements as news, stations violate both the spirit and the letter of their broadcast licenses, which obligate them to use the airwaves to serve the public."

"When in doubt, blame the robots. As Facebook has fallen from grace and struggled to reconcile its role in spreading propaganda and stoking political anger, the company has proposed a familiar solution: If the algorithm has failed, let's just build a better algorithm. It's a noble goal for the next hackathon. As a mechanism for real change, however, the focus on software misses the point. Facebook's problems can't be solved with more data or better code. They're simply the most potent and alarming example of the fact that the internet has failed as a public forum."

"Fake news videos aren't new, but they are on the rise and more realistic than ever due to technological advances. What used to be a fairly big production and cost thousands of dollars can now be achieved with a selfie stick and a smartphone. That may not sound like a big deal, but when politics, propaganda and bad intentions enter the fray, the potential to cause harm is staggering and potentially irreparable.   ASU Now spoke to Dan Gillmor and Eric Newton , who launched News Co/Lab in October, a collaborative lab inside the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication that aims to help the public find new ways of understanding and engaging with news and information. They believe fake videos soon will be "trivially easy, inexpensive, and all too believable.""

"Troll farms, bots, dark ads, fake news ... from Putin's Russia to Brexit Britain, new methods are being used to change politics and crush dissent. It's time to fight back"

"The debate about mis- and dis-information has intensified, but, as our report argues, we're still failing to appreciate the complexity of the phenomenon at hand. The report refrains from using the term 'fake news' and urges journalists, academics and policy-makers to do the same. This is for two reasons. First, the term is woefully inadequate to describe the complexities of information disorder. Second, it has been appropriated by politicians worldwide to describe news organizations whose coverage they find disagreeable, and, in this way, has become a mechanism by which the powerful clamp down upon, restrict, undermine and circumvent the free press. Our new definitional framework introduces three types, elements and phases of information disorder. We describe the differences between the three types of information using dimensions of harm and falseness: Mis-information is when false information is shared, but no harm is meant. Dis-information is when false information is knowingly shared to cause harm. Mal-information is when genuine information is shared to cause harm, often by moving private information into the public sphere."